Yesterday was the kind of family day that I'd dreamed of
having for a very long time. It seems like it was such a simple thing,
but it meant a great deal to me.

My cousin Peach and her husband Bob had gone to my mother's
the day before and were staying for a couple of days. We made
arrangements to meet them at the nursing home and then Peach invited me back
to the house for dinner and mentioned that Ed, my mother's stepson, would be
joining us for dinner. Ed and my mother get together at least once a
week, to have dinner and watch CSI. Over the past couple of
years, Ed has become friends with Peach and Bob, who occasionally spend a
week at my mother's house.

It felt like being invited to join what had felt, until now,
like an exclusive club.

With no puppies to care for, Walt decided to join me on the
trip this day and so we drove to the nursing home where we visited with my
mother until Peach and Bob arrived. Walt and I went out to get a quick
lunch and when we returned, the others had already moved to the rec room,
where they were involved in their favorite activity: playing cards.

My mother has been passionate about games of all kinds for my
entire life and she is a fierce competitor who gets upset (good naturedly)
when things are not going well for her.

Walt and I joined the second game. It was a game the
three of them play all the time and I have played once before and Walt has
never played. You play for money (high stakes--65 cents) and with
newbie luck, Walt and I won most of the hands, and I won the pot at the end.

("I've been sick," my mother would whine, trying to
pull out her trump card. We wouldn't let her get away with it.)

There was much laughter throughout the game, and it was just
a lot of fun.

There was a singing group which was entertaining patients in
the room next door, and we all sang along with them as we played.

At the end of the afternoon, we moved my mother back to her
room and returned to her house, where Peach had planned a dinner for all of
us. We sat around trying to work up a schedule for who would be
available to help my mother when she is released from the nursing home next
Friday and got the start of a calendar going.

After Ed arrived, we sat around the dinner table, which
seemed very strange without my mother at its head, and we laughed a lot,
talked a lot and just enjoyed a fun evening.

When my mother married her second husband, a man with three
grown children, I had envisioned that the two families would blend and share
some social events together, but for one reason or another, that never
happened. Over the years I've just resigned myself to my mother having
two families, which never meshed.

It's a strange thing to think that after all these years
(they were married 18 years and her husband has been dead for about 11
years), it has taken a broken ankle to finally get the two branches of the
family to work together.

I don't know how this is all going to go, but I am enjoying
having "siblings" of a sort, again, for the first time since my sister died
in 1971.